Fanny opened her eyes to a world softened and new. A warm world, she accepted like a child, without wonder. Over the gas-jet was a shade of green. The walls cast a kind dimness. On the deep windowsill a brazier burned. Bottles stood sheer from the shadow, blue and black and brown ... warm emanations of a good will they seemed in their suggestion that being ill she was nursed, being weak fortified. They stood beneath the tender steam of the brazier like good words. The room was warm. It had warm breath. It was alive and gentle wrapping her about like fond extensions of these quiet, these brand-new sheets.... Magic! all good ... all so more natural than that hard seed of the past she had dwelt in, been imprisoned in: long walls, rigid, shutting her up, lifting her softness hard above the City’s hardness. Fanny drew out her hands from the warm covers. Fingers touched, tried each other: fingers pressed in the moist flesh of her palms ... lean hands yet new. The room was a caress. Through the moving door came a figure very high: figure slim and athrob beneath a drawn green gown, under black hair let loose upon its shoulders. Clara pressed sheer through the caressing room. Clara! Magic and wonderlessness, most magical of all. Clara! with her hair let down, in a green wrap. Her loom was the substance of the warming air: her being sheer over the bed was the mouth that had uttered all these transforming words: the blue alcohol flame, the bottles, medicine, milk, the soothing walls about the fended light, _herself_, newest word of all, that lay in a clean bed ... the truest and the sweetest word of all this mouth that was Clara. “Dear, dear,” came Clara’s voice. “You are awake and you are better.” She sat beside her. She gave her broth. Fanny was soothed, in a oneness swallowing the hot broth: she was one with Clara.... Dimmed gas, bowed throat of her friend and agile hands holding the cup and the spoon were one, articulately, with her own heavy eyes and the lips she felt as she opened them and swallowed. There was her will, there were the features of her will. What touched her eyes and her skin, her ears and her taste was a symphonic unity which she could love, as she lay swathed within it, as a child loves its own body.... * * * * * Clara slept in a big armchair which had appeared in the room’s transforming. Each day came the Doctor. He had a little ruddy VanDyck beard and eyes that twinkled. He had soothing hands. He was a part of Clara ... hence of Fanny. When he left, there was his soothing wake in the soft brown air of the room. “You are silent,” she said to him, “like a canoe.” “Well, we’ll paddle you back to shore and health,” he smiled. She saw the eyes of Clara beam excitement. “You have not spoken,” Clara said, “you have not spoken before!” --I love my silence. Fanny lay back in her new thick pillows. I am going to be silent. “Soon we can bring you away from this dreadful place. Can’t we, Doctor?”